by Moriah Jovan
Tax deductions. God, that was hilarious, and I started to laugh.
It would be a strange feeling to have a female friend, one who could and would guide me through this foreign world, one who was as acerbic as I, and one who might be smarter.
Inconceivable.
Extraordinary.
* * * * *
No Immunity, No Guarantee
February 16, 2011
“You’re what?!”
I sat at Nigel and Gordon’s kitchen table Wednesday evening after having intruded upon their meal. Gordon, now an accomplished housewife, cooked on the weeknights and expected the girls to show up for family dinner if they weren’t working. He wouldn’t deign to cook “poor people food,” but then, he didn’t have to.
I continued to eat calmly while my daughters and ex-husband stared at me, aghast at my news. Nigel simply looked smug.
Clarissa hopped up and started to pace the kitchen. “How could you?”
“You act as if I have personally affronted you,” I said. “Since this is my life and nothing I have ever done has pleased you, why would you think I’d start trying to please you now?”
“Yeah, but him?”
“I see. It’s that it’s Mitch and Mitch called you on your shit.”
“He’s an asshole,” she hissed.
“Clarissa!” Paige yelled.
I looked up at Clarissa through my eyelashes and said nothing while she glared at Paige, until she realized my silence meant I was awaiting her attention.
“I warned you about that,” I murmured. Her mouth tightened. “We’re going to try this out for a year. The plan is to let you girls live in the townhouse. But if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head you and your sisters can find somewhere else to live and I’ll lease the townhouse.”
“YOU’RE MOVING?!”
I didn’t know it was possible for Clarissa to look more horrified. Why, I didn’t know. I thought she’d be ecstatic to get rid of me. Never mind she’d voluntarily moved back home after four days of exile. I hadn’t bothered to stop her nor ask her why.
“Yes.”
She dropped into her chair, completely deflated. “But—”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Helene stared at her plate, picked at her food with her fork, her mouth pursed. The twins’ fingers were faintly moving, and I knew that they were signing to each other in the language they’d concocted before they could speak. Gordon sat back to look at me speculatively, his arms crossed over his chest.
Nigel continued to eat.
“I like it,” Gordon finally pronounced and turned his attention back to his plate. “Congrats, Cass.”
“What?!” Clarissa screeched. “Daddy!”
“Clarissa,” he said with gentle astonishment, “this man obviously makes your mother happy. Don’t you want her to be happy?”
She wouldn’t argue the point with her father for fear of earning a look of sad disappointment. And what could she say? No, I don’t want her to be happy?
“The wedding is March eighteenth in Bethlehem,” I informed them coolly. “Mitch’s home. That’s a Friday. I would like for you girls to be my bridesmaids, but of course I would understand if you chose not to be, nor would I be surprised if you chose not to attend at all.”
That got cries of protest from Helene and Olivia. Paige clapped and bounced in her chair, quivering in delight.
But Clarissa sat staring out the back window of Nigel and Gordon’s brownstone, her arms across her chest, moisture glittering in the corners of her eyes.
“However,” Nigel said in a stern voice. “Children. Make sure you have no conflicting events next Friday. We’re invited to have dinner with all the Hollanders, and we will go to that. “
Oh?
Clarissa reflexively moved to protest, but then thought better of it when she caught Gordon’s expression of vague puppy-dog hope that she would cooperate.
I stared at Nigel, awaiting an explanation for this outrage, but he kept his face perfectly expressionless and said,
“I think Mitch and I are going to become very good friends.”
Shit.
* * * * *
BFFs
February 20, 2011
I did, indeed, sit with Prissy and her tax deductions in sacrament meeting on Sunday. Her husband, as the first counselor, sat up on the stand next to Mitch. Mitch’s second counselor was wearing a rich peach-colored tie today, and his family was smartly dressed in the same color. Mitch again conducted the meeting and cast me a sly glance that made Prissy bow her head and shudder with suppressed laughter.
Prissy’s children were the most well-behaved ones I’d ever met, which didn’t surprise me after I saw the evil eye she cast her four-year-old boy for speaking during the passing of the sacrament. He shut up immediately.
So did the misbehaving children in the pew in front of us when she tapped one on the head with a finger and glared at them the same way. I was at once in awe and thoroughly envious. Surely, one had to be born with talent like that.
Surprisingly, Sitkaris—who was again the substitute teacher—didn’t speak to me, approach me, or lob sexual innuendoes at me before class, but with a look, he made sure to let me know he hadn’t changed his mind about what he wanted from me.
Then his glance slid to Prissy, who had decided to take up residence to my left, and his lip curled slightly. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Prissy lightly scratch the side of her nose—
—with her middle finger.
It was all I could do not to laugh.
Sally plopped herself down on my right just before the lesson began and exclaimed, “Cassie! You were welcome to sit with us during sacrament meeting. That way, Prissy would’ve had a little more room in her pew.” I hate women. “Prissy, aren’t you supposed to be in Gospel Doctrine?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Sally,” Prissy replied smoothly. “I didn’t know you had dibs on Cassie.”
I’d dine out on this for months.
Or not—
“Cassie,” Prissy said sternly when Sally reluctantly left us alone in between Sunday school and Relief Society. The room emptied but for two or three people toward the front, and Sitkaris’s only gesture was to caress my shoulder as he walked by on his way to the men’s meeting. “I request that you not take a bite out of Sally. She’s fragile.”
I didn’t really like the implication that I hadn’t figured that out. “You just did.”
“Oh, honey. You haven’t seen me put anybody in their place yet.”
But I’d love to. “Why do you care? She doesn’t like you anyway.”
“You know why she doesn’t like me?”
“Um... Because you’re smart and outspoken?”
“No. Because I’m fat and I have a happy marriage, and she’s thin and pretty and doesn’t.”
I thought that a bit simplistic and said so.
“Look, Cassie. She can spit little poisoned darts at me all day long and it won’t make any difference. Yeah, it’s annoying, and it hurts. But she’s not evil. She’s just unhappy and probably clinically depressed. I might dig at her here and there, but a little dig is all it takes. Anything more than that, anything closer to her heart, would crush her.”
I stared at Prissy for a long moment, understanding that I was seeing into the soul of a very caring woman who didn’t show it much. And though I had already decided my course, I simply nodded.
“I enjoyed your little love play with Brother Sitkaris,” I said after a moment. She harrumphed and crossed her arms over her massive bosom, but said nothing. “Well?”
She slid me an annoyed glance. “I don’t gossip. In case I didn’t make that clear enough last week.”
“He has a thing for me,” I said, just to poke at her.
“No kidding.”
“I wasn’t sure anyone else noticed.” The corners of her mouth began to twitch. “He’s kind of, shall we say...smarmy.”
“Cassie,” she drawled, trying to suppress her amusement an
d failing.
“Apparently you and I are the only ones who know what a faker he is.”
She sighed.
“Also? He’s a manwhore.”
“I know that,” she said in a sing-song voice.
I started. “You do?”
“You know what happens when you don’t gossip?”
“People tell you things.”
“Exactly. And you know what they say about knowledge.”
“I’ll trade some of my power for some of yours.”
She said nothing. I was preparing to apologize for having taken our banter beyond her threshold of offense when she said smoothly, “You willing to put your money where your mouth is?”
“Uh...” Dammit, the woman had cornered me rather neatly. At this rate, I was going to catch a serious girlcrush. “Okay. I’ll bite.”
“After class.” She whipped an iPhone out of a hidden pocket in her dress. “But for now, stats, please.”
We were still thumbing our contact information into our respective devices when Sally returned to her defensive position on my right. I ignored her sniff of jealousy-tinged disdain. Whether it was over the gadgets or who had dibs on me or something else entirely, I didn’t know, but I stopped thinking about it because Relief Society began.
Like the week before, Louise made me welcome.
“And you are?” she said to someone else.
Prissy, Sally, and I all looked to the right to see whom Louise had singled out. An older woman, with dull salt-and-pepper hair, wrinkled skin a shade darker than the color my Italian ancestors had bequeathed me, tired brown eyes, and a hint of a widow’s hump, stood and smiled vaguely. Her simple floral shirtwaist dress was faded and nearly threadbare, and her dingy cardigan had a hole in one elbow.
“Sister Schoonover,” she said. “From DC. Visiting for a while.”
“Are you moving here?”
“No,” she said as she sat, obviously uncomfortable with the attention. “Just passing through.”
“Do you need anything while you’re here?”
She hesitated. “Um, no. Thank you.”
“Welcome, then,” Louise said with a smile.
“She looks like she’s been rode hard and put away wet,” Sally muttered with a sniff.
I hate women.
“Sally,” I murmured, “that was mean.” She flushed and bowed her head, wrung her hands in her lap. I opened my mouth to put a scalpel-sharp point on it, but an elbow poke in my ribs made me shut it again.
Not without a huff, which Prissy ignored.
I revisited my phone and occupied myself with tasks I could accomplish in the next forty-five minutes. I emailed my architect and designer. First: Remodel the unused fourth floor of my townhouse into a bedroom fit for a perpetual honeymoon (to exacting specifications). Second: Transform The Bordello into a separate apartment (to even more exacting specifications). Third: Do it yesterday. I emailed my daughters and told them to move in with Gordon and Nigel for the next couple of weeks or else deal with construction dust without complaint.
A mother can dream.
We were deep into the lesson (to which I was not paying attention) when Prissy whispered, “I know her from somewhere.”
I looked at my friend and saw her casting glances at the woman from DC.
“Where?”
Prissy started, vaguely focused on me, and I realized she hadn’t meant to say anything at all. “Uh...” she said after a second or two, her attention suddenly split between trying to dig out a memory and displaying basic etiquette. She shook her head and went back to digging.
The lesson ended, the closing hymn was sung, the closing prayer was given, and the post-worship exodus began.
“Sally.”
I looked up to see an ordinary-looking man standing next to Sally’s chair, his hand held out in a gallant manner. Her mouth tightened and she looked away.
“Hi, Dan,” Prissy said brightly.
“Hi, Prissy,” he said without looking away from Sally. His expression was one of the most heartbreaking I’d ever seen: love, hurt, betrayal... Things most men were adept at hiding, but this man clearly had no pride left.
“Well, hello,” I murmured up at him in my most seductive voice, a weapon of some consequence.
That got his attention.
Sally’s, too.
I ignored her gasp and gave him the once-over. He flushed. Her mouth tightened. She promptly placed her hand in his, allowing him to pull her to her feet. She left pissed, but he cast a relieved and very grateful smile back at me as they exited the room.
“I haven’t had this much fun at church in a long time,” Prissy said mildly as the last of the stragglers exited and the doors clicked closed, the only sounds the quiet roar of conversation from the hallway.
I turned to her. “Spill it.”
“You realize, of course,” she began haughtily, “that I don’t like doing this. It makes me feel positively filthy.”
“But...?”
“But...” She sighed. “I need to know. And I don’t have the means to find out for myself.”
I waited while she gathered herself enough to break her own code.
“I know some people in the stake who— They’ve all had some weird financial problems the last couple of years, kind of all at the same time. Wiped them out. The bad part is that these are financially responsible people. None of them were rich, but they were well off—you know, the millionaire-next-door types—and they got that way with hard work and being frugal. But now they’re barely hanging on. Can you—” I watched her struggle to find words because it galled her so. “You have people, right?”
I nodded.
“If I give you their names, can you... I don’t know, find out what happened to them? They don’t talk to anybody, don’t come to church anymore.”
“You know these people personally?”
“Only a couple of them. But I hear things.”
“So what’s the bearing false witness part of that? Mitch has people, too. It’d be easy enough for him to check out.”
“Well, for one, Mitch has enough problems with just the people in this ward. There’s almost four hundred of us. He doesn’t need to be dealing with the problems of people in the rest of the stake, too, considering there are nine wards in it. Do the math. They all have their own bishops for a reason.”
I could buy that. “And for two?”
She took a deep breath. “They and their money problems all have Greg Sitkaris in common.”
I barely kept my mouth from dropping open. “What does he do for a living?” I already knew that, but wanted whatever details Prissy had that I didn’t.
“He works for Mitch’s father-in-law, managing the Bethlehem office of Shane’s firm. Sells insurance, annuities. Brokers mortgages. Does some financial planning. Kind of a financial jack of all trades. People trust members of the Church not to rip them off.”
I sighed.
“Whatever his other shortcomings, Shane Monroe is an honest man, so I think this is all Greg. I wouldn’t even be surprised if Greg’s cheating Shane, too.”
I wondered how much of this Mitch knew or suspected.
“Anyway, everybody knows Greg and I don’t get along, so anything I could say would be suspect. Me making trouble.”
I could see that. “And...you want me to spend my resources following your hunch.” Her eyes narrowed, and I couldn’t help chuckling at her.
“He desperately wants to be bishop,” she said low. “And he’s best pals with the stake president. Once Mitch is released—which was overdue two years ago—I have no doubt Greg will be called. And I— That cannot happen.” She shuddered. “I look at his wife and daughter and— Well, I can’t imagine the emotional and spiritual devastation he would cause, and have a grand time doing it.”
I sighed. “Surely there’s something you can do to forestall or prevent that?”
“Oh, yes. We have a mechanism by which the membership can object to someone being calle
d to a position. I’ve never seen it done, but I’ll do it. My husband will. A few other people in the ward. But we’re a very small minority and we’ll need proof for when they take us aside and ask why.”
“And protect yourself from retribution.”
“Right.”
She was holding something back, even now. “All of it, Prissy. I need to know the end game.”
She harrumphed. “Fine. Louise and I are on a mission to get Amelia and Hayleigh away from him. We don’t know how to do that. Yet.”
...politically delicate.
“Let me see if I’ve got this straight. Sitkaris is handsome, seductive, and well off. Mitch is wealthy, but big, gruff, intimidating, and in a position where he has to deny people things they want. He’s also not nearly as attractive as Greg. The stake president’s a decent guy trying to do his job, but he’s as snowed by Greg as everybody else because he only sees one side of him. Any action Mitch takes against him will be seen as somewhat sour grapes because of Greg’s popularity and Mitch’s relative unpopularity.”
She nodded. “Add to that the fact that Mitch has fired his share of members from the Steelworks. He has a built-in non-fan base. You know he didn’t rehire anybody from the old J.I. human resources department, right? Greg was one of them.”
I stared at her. “He was?”
“Yes, before he went to work for Shane. He was the employee benefits administrator.”
I sure as hell hadn’t known that. “You know why they didn’t rehire anyone from human resources?”
“No. Nobody does.”
“There were thefts coming out of that department and the people who engineered the consolidation didn’t know who to trust. They still don’t know who the guilty party was. Or if there were more than one.”
We looked at each other, and I could almost hear our tumblers clicking into place at the same time.
“Mitch and Greg have never liked each other,” Prissy mused. “I think there’s some ancient history there nobody knows about. Even then, it didn’t stop them from working together to get the ward’s business done. But then...”
“But then?”
“In November. Mitch released Greg from being Young Men’s president. That was a shocker. People are still mad at him over it. I swear, I thought they were going to crucify him.”
